Author Archives: Barb

A Simple Homeschool Thanksgiving

Posted on by
2

If you’re one of those lucky people who are having Thanksgiving at their house this year, I’ve got some advice for you. Don’t do school that week!

I realize this isn’t an issue for you unschoolers out there. But there are others who are emotionally attached to our lesson plans, whether we’ve written them out to the tiniest detail, or just have a few goals we like to keep in mind. Ever the optimists, we think we can get plenty of school done on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving Wednesday night to get our dinner cooked in advance. That’s called dreaming.

Here’s a Thanksgiving plan for the homeschool mom that I developed after many years of running myself ragged trying to do school Thanksgiving week while planning, shopping for and cooking a Thanksgiving dinner. It’s the result of years of fine-tuning, careful consideration and a few mommy meltdowns. These days, my goal is to keep things as simple as possible.

Monday:

First thing in the morning, have the kids clean up the area(s) where you do school

Next, provide them with sheets of construction paper, markers, scissors and glue sticks, and ask them to make place cards, a centerpiece for the table and decorations for the house, featuring turkeys, Indians, pilgrims and anything else they deem Thanksgiving-ish.

This will keep them busy for a while, leaving you free to study your cookbooks and the grocery sale flyers so you can plot your menu and your plan of attack (Tip: go to the store with the most sale items you need first; if they’re out of something (if?), you can pick it up at one of the other stores).

Monday night:

Leave your husband or a sitter with the kids so you can do your grocery-shopping in peace. Going by yourself means you’ll get done faster. It’s also your best chance of coming home with everything on your list.

Tuesday:

Time to clean the house for company; be sure to get your kids involved by setting a timer for 15 minutes, then telling them anything you find of theirs that’s not in its place when the bell rings becomes yours. That should help get rid of most of the general clutter.

Take your own clutter (in my case that’s magazines, newspapers and books), throw it into a laundry basket, and hide it in the basement or laundry room. Do the same with your husband’s clutter.

Set the kids loose with dust cloths and the vacuum cleaner. Remember, the house doesn’t have to be spotless, just reasonably clean and uncluttered.

Give a little person a feather or lambs’ wool duster and let them clean as they wish.

Give someone else a spray bottle of window cleaner and a roll of paper towels, and ask them to shine the kitchen appliances and any windows they can reach.

When all the cleaning is done, sit down together and read some Thanksgiving stories. (We like Stories of the Pilgrims by Margaret Pumphrey).

Tuesday night:

Assemble all the recipes you’ll need and read each (especially the turkey directions) to refresh your memory. Run out to the store for any ingredients you might have forgotten. You do not want to go to the store tomorrow.

Wednesday:

Get that turkey and stuffing going bright and early; once it’s done, remove all the meat and place it in a big aluminum roaster for reheating tomorrow. Store the turkey and stuffing separately in the refrigerator. Pitch the turkey carcass, or freeze it for making soup stock some other time.

The kids should help with the meal preparations. Kids can:

  • peel potatoes
  • cut up vegetables
  • polish silverware
  • cut loaves of bread into cubes for stuffing
  • wash dishes and utensils

In addition to the above, teenagers can:

  • assemble casseroles
  • bake pies
  • add table leaves and bring in additional chairs and tables, if necessary

Wednesday night:

Give the kids poster paper and markers, and ask them to draw the things for which they are thankful. Display posters prominently around the house. While they’re busy with that, you can finish preparing make-ahead recipes such as gelatin salads and baked desserts.

Thursday morning:

Reheat the turkey and stuffing.

Work on the rest of the meal.

Assign your husband and kids to set the table(s). The kids can set out their beautiful centerpiece and place cards.

Enjoy the day with relatives and friends.

Thursday night:

After the relatives have gone, the kids are in bed, and you and your husband have collapsed on the sofa, consider what you have to be thankful for:

You get to see your kids every day.

You get to witness their growth, the thrill of learning to read, the accomplishment of mastering new skills.

Your life isn’t run by a school schedule or a bus schedule. You’re your own boss, and you plan your day the way you want to. How many other adults have that freedom?

Thank God for making you a mom, for blessing you with the specific kids he sent.

Most especially, thank Him for blessing you with the opportunity to homeschool those kids, for giving you all this time with them now. Someday they’ll be grown and gone, and you’ll have ten times as many memories as other moms, because you were there with them every day.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Homeschooling Your Child with Down Syndrome

Posted on by
3

Momto4 left this comment on my old blog:

I had my daughter in public school, she is 6 in kindergarten and has down syndrome. They haven’t a CLUE what they are doing. I was very disappointed in their lack of teaching. I will be homeschooling her and it will be interesting as I have never done such a feat. Is there anywhere one could go to help start off in kindergarten for my little girl? Is the curriculum the same? So many many questions. I do know this, anything is better than what we have now.

Since there might be other parents with this same problem, I thought I’d post my response here, where they can find it easily.

Momto4, I admire you for taking matters into your hands once you became unhappy with your daughter’s schooling experience. Pro-active parents are the best asset a child with a disability can have.

Every child with Down syndrome has unique abilities and unique needs, and that’s why I did not use a specific curriculum with my son with Ds, who is now 15. Having homeschooled three older children, I could see that my son was not at or near grade level in scholastic subjects at age 6. I decided instead to test him (using a test I rented for a very reasonable cost from HSLDA). There weren’t any surprises in the test results because I’d been working with him since he was 3 or 4, but you might find such testing very useful for you and your daughter. It will give you an idea of where to concentrate your efforts.

Anyway, after testing him, I continued working with him as I had since he was small, using my own IEP to chart the path we’d need to follow at his speed. We read many, many books, he practiced his printing every day, and we played lots of board games that stressed the different skills he needed.

For example, he had real problems grasping numbers conceptually. He could recite numbers but did not understand what they meant. We played the game “Trouble” once or twice a day and that helped him understand what “six” meant, because that’s the best number to get in that game. BTW, I frequently found the best educational games (sold in teacher stores) discounted at TJMaxx and Marshalls. For my son, educational games where he learns by using his hands instead of just sitting and listening are a real blessing.

My son is speech-delayed, like many children (especially boys) with Ds. I sat in on his sessions with the speech therapist and imitated what she did with him at home on a regular basis. We could not afford thrice-weekly sessions, which had been recommended, but at least this way he was getting daily speech practice. One of the most effective methods of working on speech sounds with him was something the therapist taught me: he’d say a word or sound and I’d reward him with a puzzle piece. So he had to make 100 sounds to get all the pieces of a 100-piece puzzle, and then we’d work on the puzzle together. (We still do this at least once a week, because he really enjoys it.)

In addition to working on his letters, number concepts and speech, we did lots of artwork, including working with crayons, paint, stampers and clay. He loved this, and it was a nice break from the “school” work. We also got him out in nature by going on bike rides (we used a third wheel attachment on my husband’s bike because our son loved to run off and we didn’t want to teach him to ride a bike on his own, thus helping him get away from us more quickly!) Visits to parks, zoos and the aquarium also widened his horizons.

One more thing we did as part of his “school” was to teach him how to work around the house. He’d seen the older kids doing their chores and wanted to be like them, so this wasn’t hard. In fact, he’s been a very eager helper. He also likes to work with his dad in his workshop. (I can still picture him at around age five or so driving nails into a piece of wood with great intensity.)

You’ve asked for specific materials that will tell you what to do with your daughter. There have been several books that helped me learn how to work with my son, and I will list them in a subsequent post. In the meantime, I’ve asked another blogger who homeschools a daughter with Ds to answer your question. You’ll find her post here.

The bottom line, Momto4, is that you are really doing something wonderful for your daughter. Homeschooling her will mean she will get much more one-on-one instruction, or “face time” as I like to call it. Not only is that much better for her, but it will help you learn more about how she learns. She’ll also be able to avoid the negative effects of school socialization, such as picking up bad habits and being bullied because of her disability. And, of course, the bottom line is that you know her better than any teacher can know her, so she’s getting a teacher who knows her well and wants the very best for her. I think your daughter is very fortunate to have you for a mom.

(If you enjoyed this article, you may also like Book List for Homeschooling a Child with Down syndrome.)

Preparing for Adulthood Without College

Posted on by
Reply

I loved college. I loved the campus, I loved the dorms, and I loved the challenging classes (well, most of them). College was a great experience for me, and once I began having children, it was something I wanted for them, too. I assumed they would feel the same way. But as my oldest reached her mid-teens, she decided that college was not for her.

At first I thought she would change her mind, and so I geared her work toward college preparatory subjects, and required her to take the PSAT and ACT. She scored above average on both tests. Soon college brochures and catalogs filled our mailbox, but none of them changed her mind.

Her dream was to work and be on her own. She felt that going to college was a way of delaying adulthood, and she was eager to be an adult. She had dreams of travel, and eventually getting her own place to live. She had been very independent, even as a small child, and that trait grew stronger as she approached her late teens.

I kept thinking that maybe we should just sign her up somewhere. I thought if she went away to school and lived with other girls her age, she would change her mind and enjoy her surroundings. But my husband felt that there was no point in sending an unmotivated student.

As I grew to accept the inevitability of the situation, teaching only college preparatory subjects felt all wrong. Why study subjects she had no interest in, like a foreign language or chemistry, if she wasn’t going to need them for college? All she could talk about was how she was going to move to this city or that city. Some of her plans were very impractical because she had no idea of what it would cost to live on her own. Her naive talk started to make me a little nervous.

I closely studied my large collection of homeschool catalogs, hoping to find resources we could use for her last year of homeschooling. But it seemed like most products were geared toward the college-bound student, and those that remained focused on cooking and sewing. She already knew how to cook and sew. I was more concerned about how she would handle credit cards and whether she really understood how much it would cost her to feed and house herself. If she didn’t want a degree, she would likely have to live on a modest income. (How times have changed!)

I decided to design sensible projects for her. So, in addition to Math Review, Shakespeare, Bible, History and Expository Writing, each week she had to research different aspects of living on her own. She compared rents in different cities, and interviewed insurance agents, landlords and utility companies. She asked many questions and got many answers.

Soon we branched out to subjects she would need to know about before she got her first full-time job. She learned about health insurance (a must, as our health insurance would not cover her once she turned 19 unless she attended college full-time). She learned about taxes and withholding, budgeting and even mortgages. She educated herself about every aspect of buying a car, and the pros and cons of car loans.

I noticed that as she completed the projects*, her naive plans slowly turned into more logical ones. By the time she finished homeschooling, I felt that she was well-prepared for independence. She started studying different cities on her own. She researched and bought her first car, for which she paid cash, because she understood just how much interest a car loan would have cost her. And she didn’t move out as soon as she turned 18, as she’d always said she would, because now she really understood that she couldn’t afford it.

Instead, she saved up a portion of her pay, and she now has a good-sized savings account. She is nearly 20, and will soon move into a city apartment with two other young women. We will miss her, but we see how excited she is about living on her own, and we are thankful that she is prepared for it.

Walking through the preparation process with her taught me a lot, too. I learned to listen to what she was really saying instead of expecting her to want what I wanted for her. I saw how prepared she could become with the right training. And now I get to see her try her wings as she leaves the nest.

Author note: Since I wrote this article almost ten years ago, my daughter has lived in three large Midwestern cities. She now owns two Internet businesses and, unlike many of her peers, is enjoying the debt-free life.

* The projects are in my book Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers.

The Increasing Danger in Public Schools

Posted on by
3

I’ve written extensively about the many negatives of public schools: herd mentality, negative socialization, indoctrination, bullying, etc. As much as I see homeschooling as something positive in its own right, it’s also a great way to give your children a far better education than what they’ll get in a public school.

But I never dreamed that yet another reason would crop up, one that would make it imperative that people take their children out of the public education system: increasing numbers of these teachers are sexual predators.

And it’s hard to know which ones are the predators. For example, who would look at this young woman, an Iowa math teacher, and suspect that she sends nude photos of herself to students and performs sex acts on them?

Or this young man in Pennsylvania, another math teacher, who sent dirty texts and a thong to one of his students, promising her extra credit if she sent him a nude photo of herself AND it turned him on. How creepy is that?

While teachers preying on students is not unheard of, we’re seeing new reports of such teachers on a regular basis these days. The fact is that sexual predators are in schools all over this country, and until they’re caught in the act it’s almost impossible to know who they are. How do you know your child won’t be targeted by one? You can’t know….and you can’t guarantee your child’s safety in school. You can only guarantee your child’s safety by teaching your child at home.